Breeds 2 (7 page)

That thought appealed to him.

He entered the apartment complex and headed for the stairwell, having no desire to take the elevator or risk a chance encounter with the other tenants. It wasn’t worth the awkward angst, and going up six flights was good for a light burn in his legs. Kirk took the stairs a pair at a time, still carrying the dozen beer and cloth grocery bags. He smelled the two descending people before he passed them. Kirk kept his head down and didn’t make eye contact. Didn’t greet. He wasn’t sociable, and his neighbors thankfully left him alone. The other tenants were wary about the recluse on the sixth floor, and he’d long since picked up on the vibe and welcomed it.

His ensemble of old jeans, thick black fisherman sweater, and an olive-green army surplus jacket didn’t attract much attention on the streets of Halifax. He didn’t dress to impress. Same could be said for his shaving habits, having allowed his beard to grow to epic biker lengths. He did buzz his light brown hair on top regularly, as a shorn head somehow offset the tangled wildness of his chin moss.

He pulled open the sixth-floor door with the hand holding his groceries. Two minutes later, he was inside his apartment, turning and sliding the locks behind him. Somber daylight shone through the living room’s picture window, partially blocked by a half-drawn curtain. Kirk moved through his home’s shadows, depositing the beer on a countertop, right next to the other for an impressive collection. The groceries followed and he made quick work of stowing them away. Eight beers crowded into the lower shelf of his fridge and Kirk smiled at them all, his little arsenal of bubbly happiness. Hamburgers were on the menu tonight. He’d thought about ordering out for pizza but overruled it in favor of a cheeseburger. He wanted a cheeseburger badly and hoped the rare taste of fried meat with just a squirt of barbecue sauce would do the trick. Help him take the edge off. That wicked edge that made his jaws ache and most food tasteless.

That thought made him crack open the first beer of the evening.

A beat-up copy of
Salem’s Lot
rested on the coffee table and Kirk meant to be a good thirty pages into it before the beer rushed his senses. It was a departure from the classics he usually read, but early King was a classic unto itself.

Kirk plodded deeper into the living room with his beer in hand. He groaned as his ass sank into a comfortable couch. He tussled his hair, scratching at the places that demanded it. The King book captured his attention and he glanced toward the half-open curtains, gauging the light. It would be enough to read by.

He drained half the bottle in one determined bout, breaking contact with a gasp.

“Good stuff,” he huffed and solemnly regarded the label.
Alexander Keith’s
. No finer existed, although he did enjoy some of the imported Korean and Japanese brands.

Kirk studied the couch and lay down, socked feet hanging over the armrest, beer placed on the coffee table. The white field that was his ceiling held his attention, and he took the moment to relax and empty his mind. A lot of shit had gone down over the last few months. All of it concerned watching over Ross Kelly’s initiation to the
were
world. Kirk’s emotions were divided over that, since he was the one who brought the Newfoundlander into the fold. He wondered if Ross would ever hate him for what he’d done, bringing him over to the “weird” side, as the Newfoundlander had come to call it.

At the time, Kirk thought infecting Ross was the only way to save his life. He couldn’t allow the alternative, didn’t want to consider the alternative. Kirk hoped he’d done the best thing with Ross. The slow drag of years would eventually reveal all.

Cheeseburgers. Kirk decided he’d go for as rare as possible. The thought of blood made his mouth squirt. Kirk didn’t appreciate that so he chugged the remainder of his beer, pouring the suds down as if it could douse a fire.

His cell phone vibrated, making circles on the far end of the coffee table. Kirk watched the thing buzz out a donut, stop as if exhausted, and then spin again, its single red eye glowing on and off. It reminded him all too much of a Klaxon. Kirk didn’t move, deciding to wait out the storm. He didn’t want to talk to anyone. No interest in talking to an elder.

He answered the phone on the eighth ring, hoping the caller had already hung up.

“Yeah?”

“It’s Morris.”

No such luck.

“Afternoon, Moses.”

The void-like pause on the other end suggested the Pictou warden was none too happy with the greeting.

“Kirk,” Morris pushed on, “I need you. Up here.”

“What?”

“You. Heard.”

Kirk stared at the numbness of the white ceiling. “You okay?”

“No.”

That prompted Kirk to sit up and swing his long legs off the couch, listening to the flip phone as if it were a stubborn combination lock.

“What’s wrong?”

“Just. Get here.”

“You sound like shit.”

“Yeah.” Morris giggled, the sound as nasty and raw as a deep-cutting bone saw.

Unknown to Kirk, his breathing quickened. “Something happened?”

“Get here. Tonight.”

Kirk’s eyes fell upon his empty beer and the paperback.

“I’ll… wait,” Morris said and hung up.

The Durango had seen better moons, but its engine growled when Kirk put the pedal to the floor. He rarely drove the fifteen-year-old pickup, opting to walk as most of the amenities were well within range of his apartment complex. The Durango, however, was reserved for out of town jaunts. The odometer showed over three hundred and fifty-two thousand and change in traveled kilometers. New rust rashes appeared with every passing season, but the engine still worked and the ride wasn’t bad at all. Kirk didn’t mind the rust. He figured if he let it go, sooner or later, they’d all become a new color.

Plus, no one would ever carjack the pickup. And if someone did, well, Kirk would only head out and buy something else. He might look like a bum, but money wasn’t an issue for him.

Nor was time.

Morris’s place was a two-hour drive away, and since it was only early afternoon when Kirk got the call, he wasted little time in getting moving. He didn’t really want to go out into the sticks, but in his mind, Morris and he shared a past in surviving Borland and Newfoundland. He didn’t really owe the warden anything, but that haunting, hurting tone to Morris’s voice and the horrors of the island warranted a courtesy call at the very least.

Besides, it wasn’t every day a warden called another for a meeting.

Something was in the wind.

Kirk drove north and arrived at the warden’s hidden cabin just as the sun slipped behind darkening treetops. He stopped on the front lawn and, with hands still on the wheel, took note of a motorcycle not ten feet away from the tree line. That puzzled Kirk. Morris was more Harley-Davidson than a foreign ride. Having inspected the motorcycle, Kirk studied the cabin ahead. No lights in the descending dark. No sign of life. The picture window to the right of the door had been smashed out. The front door lay ajar. A black line marked the opening and stayed his attention.

Kirk left the keys in the Durango, doubting anyone in the sticks was sick enough to steal it. He got out of the pickup and glanced left and right, scanning the shadows for danger. Nothing in sight, sound, or smell.

Not even Morris.

Kirk paused, one hand resting on the hood of his ride, and cocked his head. Waves of verboten lapped against his senses, and the open door drew his attention. Morris was nowhere in sight and that alone placed the Halifax warden a little more on edge.

But after Newfoundland, Kirk had also become a little more cautious.

“Morris?”

Nothing.

“You in there?” Kirk asked in a normal tone. “You better do something about that road of yours. You have more than a few canyons in that thing. I left a fuckin’ trail of spare parts all the way up here.”

Still no answer.

Taking a breath, Kirk studied the tree line as he walked to the front door. His paranoia was spiking. Morris should’ve met him out front. Instead, Kirk picked up the faint smell of charred meat, like something that had dropped between a crusty grill and shriveled up to a charcoal nugget. That barely detected smell made Kirk even more uneasy.

He stopped in his tracks, not wanting to enter the cabin. Morris was inside, he suspected, but something very bad had happened to him. Something Kirk didn’t want to see. The Durango waited just behind him, but he wasn’t about to drive away either. He craned his neck, attempting to peer inside the cabin’s windows, and stopped when he sighted the upper torso of a man in the living room, his features draped entirely in shadow.

Kirk held his breath. “Morris?”

The door wavered, enough to squeak, but there was no breeze. The figure in the chair might’ve moved, but Kirk wasn’t entirely certain. He went to the entrance and cringed when his weight bore down on the steps, the sound carrying.

“That you in there?”

The warden pushed the door open. It swung inward on its hinges with a fibrous groan, and weakly rebounded.

“Kirk,” the shade spoke. “Fuck you. Creeping around. Out there. Like a goddamn pansy.”

Relief melted the ice buildup in Kirk’s chest. “Jesus Christ. I thought you died or something. The fuck you sitting in the dark for?”

Morris didn’t answer right away and as Kirk stepped inside, he saw the reason why. Morris sat in an easy chair, a thick towel covering his naughty bits and a case of beer placed on a nearby end table. A cell phone rested next to the beer. Morris was otherwise naked, and his flesh, from scalp to toe, resembled a mottled red raisin. A glaze of juices glossed his scorched flesh, as if the first few layers of skin had melted away into a pasty grease. The smell Kirk had picked up on outside the cabin suddenly became clear.

The Halifax warden’s mouth hung open in shock.

“Close. The door,” Morris muttered, his melted lips mangling the words. He managed a car wreck of a smile then, or at least Kirk believed it was a smile, revealing a frightening grill of blackened teeth.

“And… feed me.”

For the next hour, Kirk did just that.

He plundered the fridge and channeled everything he found into Morris’s lipless mouth. Cold roast beef, salami, carrots, yogurt (which struck Kirk as being utterly out of place), leftover nachos, apples, oranges, bread, and anything else that didn’t require cooking. Kirk poured water down the Pictou warden’s throat as well, wetting that deep-fried maw until it snapped for more.
Food
. Morris needed a lot of it, and would probably consume everything in the cabin in order to fully regenerate.

“You eat yogurt,” Kirk said with mild disbelief, spooning it into Morris and trying hard not to dwell on the creamy mess around the guy’s mouth.

Morris glared back with black slits that sparkled in the failing light.

When he could eat no more, Morris lifted a hand that might’ve been doused in cooking oil before being torched. “I’m good.”

“You’re good?” Kirk asked, poised with more cold cuts.

Morris nodded weakly.

“Can you talk any?”

That brought on a chuckle, wrenching a grimace from the stricken warden.

“Just… watch the place,” Morris eventually whispered.

“Watch the place.”

“Yeah.”

“For what?”

Morris’s eyes cracked open a little wider, enough for Kirk to fear the lids might stick and pull themselves off.

“
Were
.”

Kirk straightened and looked to the windows. “There’s a wolf around here?”

“Yeah,” Morris answered. “Tell you. All about it.”

“Had a hunt?”

“Yeah.”

“Deer?”

“No. Me.”

That silenced Kirk.

Morris attempted a smile. His lips split and oozed bright blood.

“Yeah,” he chuckled through roasted lungs. “
Me
.”

Kirk wasn’t amused.

“Watch. The place,” Morris said. “Be careful.”

His strength gone, the warden relaxed, his melted skull slumping against the headrest.

A moment later, he was snoring.

That medieval rumble rooted Kirk in place for a few seconds before he glanced around the interior and spotted a quilt. This he grabbed and spread out over Morris’s sleeping form, taking the time to tuck the ends over his shoulders. Once that was done, Kirk stepped back and inspected the rest of the cabin before going to the front door. Night had fallen and a swath of stars touched by milky sails of celestial white eased into existence. Kirk gazed at the brightening cosmos and spotted the Big Dipper.

The motorcycle parked on the front lawn hadn’t moved. Kirk studied the metallic outline softly gleaming under the night sky and smelled the air. Nothing wild, unless the werewolf had taken to wearing its suit, as some of them referred to their human guises. Kirk did not.

Watch the place
, Morris had charged him.
Be careful
.

That didn’t bode well with the Halifax warden. He walked out the front door and returned to his truck, where he kept a leather sheath under the driver’s seat. Kirk took his time strapping the sheath and the silver blade it contained across the small of his back. The gathering dark allowed him to arm himself, and Kirk sensed no danger hidden within the surrounding forest. All the same, he didn’t relax his guard as he adjusted his knife, closed the door to his truck, and returned to the cabin.

One last look around the perimeter revealed nothing. Kirk locked the cabin door and settled into a corner, where the east wall joined the south. From where he stood, he had a full view of the road, his truck, and whoever owned the motorcycle.

After a concerned glance at Morris’s barbecued ass, Kirk waited.

The hours crept by, and nothing emerged from the forest. The landscape beyond the window didn’t change. No one approached the cabin or the vehicles. Kirk’s right hand strayed to the comforting knob of his silver Bowie knife.

And in time, Morris’s snoring intensified.

At first, Kirk frowned at the crackling drum solo issuing from the Pictou warden, but after the first ten minutes of the glacier breakup, he could only shake his head in wonder.